Buterin floats idea of hard-cap on Ethereum

Ethereum hard-cap “Meta-joke” from ETH creator may not be so funny, after all.

In what appears to be his first comment on the monetary policy that should underpin the cryptocurrency he created, Vitalik Buterin has floated the idea that the total number of Ethereum allowed could be capped. Up to this point, Ethereum has only limited the number of its coins can be created in one year, though that has been set at a relatively high 18m.

Buterin’s initial comments floated the idea that the total could be limited to 120, 204, 432. He later, however, backtracked on the idea somewhat. In a Twitter thread, he called his Github comments a “meta joke”.

For those still wondering whether or not https://t.co/z44anVrOuT was an April Fool’s joke, the answer is: it was an April Fool’s meta-joke. *The point* was seeing people argue about whether or not the proposal is “real”.

He them however, rather cryptically added that whether or not they were a joke “should not matter” and that if the community thought his proposal was worthwhile they should adopt it – effectively making his initial comments a variation on that favourite political tactic soft-proposing an idea in order to gauge reaction. Interestingly, his proposal is not an arbitrary amount, it would be exactly twice the number that were issued in the coin’s initial issue – hinting that more than a little thought had gone into it.

According to Cryptocompare, Ethereum (ETH) has, like much of the crypto market, had a rocky 12 months. It hit a high against GBP of £1073 in mid-January, but now stands at around £380 – still a pretty stratospheric ten-times more valuable than it when it stood £34.50 on April 3rd, 2017. Such an overt change in policy would probably help solidify the value of the currency going forward, but would need to be embraced by the community before being enacted.